I don't know what year this was, but, in high school, I was sitting next to a friend and he started telling me about a magazine article he read, apparently about Brooke Shields. I never heard of her and didn't believe a word he said. I told him there was no such thing as a "child sex symbol" and if there were such a thing, it would be illegal. And I told him that no one would ever make a movie about a child prostitute because no one would want to see it.
But I also remember seeing Brooke Shields on The Tonight Show promoting Pretty Baby. I didn't know what they were talking about, but she didn't understand the controversy around the movie at all. I didn't connect that to what my friend was talking about.
A couple of years later, I was vaguely aware of who she was but didn't understand the Brooke Shields phenomenon. Her fans seemed to be teenage girls, but how did THEY know who she was? She was known mainly for a couple of R-rated movies.
There's a new two-part documentary about her on Hulu.
I don't know what stood out to me about it. I never saw Endless Love. The director, Franco Zeffireli who came under attack recently for the nude scenes in his 1968 version of Romeo and Juliet, sounded like kind of a jerk.
Shields going to Princeton didn't impress me since all teen stars go to elite colleges. How many of them have gone to Harvard? James Franco destroyed the illusion by enrolling in several universities at the same time and the dullard George W. Bush went to Yale.
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